Working With Yourself for Healing and Growth

In our modern lives, there is a lot of information out there. And while this is a generally great thing in terms of keeping ourselves informed and helping us grow as individuals, it can also have the unintended effect of putting further pressure on ourselves and what we feel our healing should look like. In psychology and counseling, and other helping professions, there are many theories as to what helps a person. Adding in popular psychology, there are a lot of ideas out there about what makes for a healthy individual.

I am not here to say any of that information is bad or wrong—any of these things can be transformative. I want to add in a piece that may be missing to that information to assist your healing journey.

Is There a “Right” or “Wrong” Way to Heal?

 Often when we take in information, we may put immense pressure on ourselves to make our healing look like what we are watching, reading, or hearing about. “Well, this person did not include their families,” or “That person mentioned spirituality,” and so on. So, what is the “right” way to heal?

In my experience, there are no uniform paths to healing. The only “right” way to heal is the one that works for you. Just like a particular medication may work for one person with a cold, while another may work better for another person, and still a different dosage may work for another—your path to healing is unique. Yes, there are approaches that may standardize what healing may look like—but if those paths do not work for you, that does not mean you did something wrong or something is wrong with you.

What Does This Mean?

This means that you, yourself, have some major tools toward your healing journey.  And while this can be frightening, I hope this is also empowering. So how does one access these tools?

 Know Thyself: Leveraging Your Strengths

Time for an anecdote: I was a child in the backseat of my parents’ car as we approached a bridge. While looking at the valley under us, I caught sight of some graffiti with the words painted, “Know Thyself.” This artwork at the bottom of the bridge was so impactful that it found itself into this blog now. Accessing our innate tools requires us to know something about ourselves. So what does it mean to “Know Thyself?”

Knowing yourself can take the form of learning more about your needs. What makes you, you? We may try to avoid who we are, thinking it does not measure up to the people around us, but I think we do a great disservice to who we are by doing that. If we see a turtle, we don’t necessarily wish for it to purr, and if we see a cat, we don’t generally think of it as our swimming buddy (though a few on social media may have taken us by surprise!) The reason I say this is that we can generally acknowledge that different plants, animals, bugs, you name it, have their own strengths, skills, and needs. And even individual plants, animals, or bugs may have more specialized needs than their own counterparts. Why should we, as individuals, be any different? We might look at our varying needs as nuisances. But I would argue that our needs point to our strengths.

How to Identify Needs and Strengths

Here are some potential questions to reflect on when trying to learn about your individual needs and strengths. Try to approach these questions with a sense of curiosity, as opposed to judgment:

1) What times of day do I notice I have the most/least energy?

2) What activities tend to help me the most/least?

3) Do I think in words or pictures? Or something else entirely?

4) What are some differing abilities I have?

5) What parts of my identity inform my daily life?

6) How would I describe my personality?

7) Do I tend to get overwhelmed or underwhelmed quickly?

8) What things give me energy or take away from my energy?

9) What am I interested in?

After thinking or writing about these questions, think about supports you have engaged in, whether that is social supports, resources, or media, that worked naturally with some of the above identified needs and strengths. How did you feel when this was the case? How did you feel when it was not? How did this impact your daily coping? These reflections can help set you on a path to being more aware of what may suit you best, and what may not need to be necessarily a part of your individual healing journey.

Conclusion

We often spend a lot of time looking for boxes to fit ourselves in. This can feel safer, but when the boxes don’t fit, it can feel frightening and painful. What I am suggesting is approaching any search for healing from a mindset of curiosity in how the information you gather can expand upon who you are, rather than taking away from it. Approaching healing from a curiosity about yourself may yield more significant results than approaching it by beating yourself into a standard that may not necessarily be meant for you. Wishing you an authentic and self-compassionate healing journey!